Maybe I'm not as nostalgic as others but the move to digital distribution shows I never go back to games I've stopped playing. Looking at my Steam list is just a reminder of stuff I don't care about even if I enjoyed them. With Xbox, you don't get a list unless you look in your account billing, I forget half the games I've got.

Think that is why I rarely buy outside of a digital sale, such throwaway content after I'm done with it.

meme wrote:
Valve have pretty much stated directly that if they ever for some reason go out of business then they'll release all the authentication stuff for Steam so you can manually install and play games you saved to a backup. But while we're on the subject of "decades", CDs and DVDs and whatnot don't last forever either, even if stored permanently in their cases on the shelf. Even some BD discs are starting to rot nowadays. There's no such thing as a storage format that is guaranteed to last decades.

My Fight Club DVD kinda disintegrated last year. It's the oldest film I owned... Also the box for Dogma has turned into a brittle substance. So God knows what's going to happen to some of my collection fairly soon.

Yeah, the whole "physical collection as permanent" thing is just bullshit. If anything, digital games could in theory outlast them, especially with DRM free stuff like GOG where you can backup indefinitely.

The only vague excuse for latching onto physical games is for "collectors", but that's also bullshit for anything this gen, given most games are just a disc in a cheap case with a leaflet masquerading as a manual, unless you buy into all that crappy "EXCLUSIVE MASS-PRODUCED STATUE" gubbins. In which case you're an idiot.

In twenty year's time we'll probably have 360 emulators doing the archival work, anyway. Look at the SNES and the PS1. Even with the PS2 it's usually easier to just download and emulate a game than it is to find a working disc somewhere.

No-one really bothered with Xbox 1 emulation, as the people who make the emulators do so for the challenge, and they saw the PS2 as a far greater and more interesting challenge than the Xbox. They'll probably get around to it at some point.

It's just luck of the draw. They *can* last that long, but there's no guarantee they will even if you keep them in tip-top shape, and the older they get the more likely they are to degrade to unreadable states. The games you have may play, but I almost guarantee if you ran them through a CRC checker they'd come back with a few problems. The game collection I had ran into the hundreds, by the way.

PSP discs are probably just as susceptible. They're basically just mini DVDs enclosed in a shell anyway. No idea about the Vita, that's solid state.

There is a popular conspiracy theory that disc degradation is actually a planned obsolescence, that some companies deliberately use lower quality materials in their discs knowing they'll die in a decade or so when newer formats are around, but I don't buy into that much. They go for the cheaper option when pressing because it's the cheaper option, no other reason.

Yeah, that was a huge problem when they started coming out with 52 speed CD drives. Put something even vaguely low quality in there and it stood a good chance of literally exploding and wrecking the drive completely. Good times.

It's nice to think all those games you've bought over the years will last forever but, realistically, there are barely any that are worth a second playthrough and even if you did then they'll be available in some form for 20p in 5 years if they're any good.